A FILM MUSIC WAR REQUIEM

London Sinfonietta at Aldeburgh Festival

Olga Neuwirth’s War Requiem takes as its starting point not poetry or sacred texts, but a silent film – a prophetic anti-war parable made in France just one month before the outbreak of the Great War. Performed to the backdrop of the film, Neuwirth’s score, she says, ‘brushes against the grain’ in the spirit of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. In two shorter works, Goethe and Gertrude Stein serve as jumping-off points for a composer who regularly questions shared cultural memories.